Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt (born 1963) is a social psychologist and a professor at NYU Stern who built Moral Foundations Theory with Jesse Graham and Craig Joseph, out of the teaching of Richard Shweder and Paul Rozin. He wrote The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind with Greg Lukianoff, then The Anxious Generation, and he says morality starts with gut intuition before reason.

He runs Heterodox Academy and the Constructive Dialogue Institute on money from the John Templeton Foundation, and he argues the phone-based childhood harmed a generation while lawmakers turn the claim into age-gates and platform bans. He is the public expert on harm to the young, and his own name turns up in the Epstein files inside documents about moral psychology.